Submit interesting and specific facts that you just found out (not broad information you looked up, TodayILearned is not /r/wikipedia).

Posting rules

Submissions must be verifiable. Please link directly to a reliable source that supports every claim in your post title.Images alone do not count as valid references. Videos are fine so long as they come from reputable sources (e.g. BBC, Discovery, etc).

No personal opinions, anecdotes or subjective statements (e.g "TIL xyz is a great movie").

No recent sources. Any sources (blog, article, press release, video, etc.) with a publication date more recent than two months are not allowed.

No submissions regarding or related to the following

Recent politics/politicians

Police misconduct

Inflammatory submissions relating to religion/race/gender

No misleading claims. Posts that omit essential information, or present unrelated facts in a way that suggest a connection will be removed.

Rephrase your post title if the following are not met:

Titles must begin with "TIL ..."

Make them descriptive, concise and specific (e.g. not "TIL something interesting about bacon").

Titles must be able to stand on their own without requiring readers to click on a link. Starting your title with a why/what/who/where/how modifier should be unnecessary.

"TIL about ..." and other broad posts don't belong on TIL. Try /r/Wikipedia, etc. instead, or be more specific (and avoid the word "about").

Frequent TILs Repost List

As of October 2018

This list was compiled from /r/todayilearned community suggestions by its members. If your TIL is found on this list, it will be removed. The titles have been abridged for the sake of brevity, however the context remains the same. This list is subject to change. The purpose is to keep content fresh on /r/todayilearned as requested by its members. If you are interested in reading about the TILs on this list use the search box feature and enter the keywords to pull up past TILs.

They'd like to, doesn't always work like that. You can plant 100,000 veggies at 50 cents market value in April, and come fall, after taking out the rotted, under-grown, rodent-chewed veggies, you're left with 80,000 that now went down to 40 cents per. Then there's fuel, water, manure/fertilizer and farmhand costs. Farming is one of the hardest, most thankless, jobs with a low return on investment. Only way you can make it big is to have a huge farm with a supermarket/brand contract. I.e. smuckers grapes, tropicana oranges, frito-lays potatoes.

That's why futures contracts exist. Almost no farmer (bigger than 100 acres) sells all their crop at market right when it's ready. They "store" it in an elevator and sell it when the price is right for them. Some farmers even sell contracts (i.e. I'll sell you 200 bushel for $x.xx at this date in the future) before they've even finished planting it!

It's weird how your large farmers are probably better money managers than your average guy at Morgan Stanley / Fidelity / etc. Farmers have to know how to hedge, manage futures, etc. I couldn't imagine doing that as a software programmer as part of my day job. "Look, I'll sell you 50 lines of code for $100 six months from now... "

Good farmers are actually quite clever, in my experience. They're not always the most educated, but they're far from stupid. Media (as in movies, shows, etc.) just kind of pushes the "innocent stupid farmer" thing way too hard.

Absolutely this. The farmer's I've known are some of the most clever people I know, and they are among the hardest working when it's time to plant and harvest. I have massive respect for farmers and their families.

I traveled all over the country for work and I would see these tiny farms in Mississippi and across the southeast then you go to California and there were Dole farms that stretched as far as I could see. They would bus out the migrant workers to pick the food all day. Pretty amazing.

Busing labor is pretty common in produce production. Also, the "tiny" farms you saw in MS were probably more like tiny fields all being managed by a few large farms. A lot of farming in the SE takes place on fields <10A, but the fact is that the farmer probably manages dozens or hundreds of fields.

I forget what show it is, I wanna say it's Charlie in an Always Sunny episode that says something along the lines of,

"Ok, so we go in there, we get jobs and work really hard for the next 20 years. Then we're rich and those suckers never even saw it coming!"

"Charlie that's just called a job..."

That always cracks me up. I have a friend who just contacted me about a brilliant scheme like that too, "bro I've got this brilliant idea for a game, people are so stupid they'll buy it. It's gonna take a while to get off the ground, I'm still fleshing out ideas about the story and we'll need an engine, but it's gonna make a ton of money"... He couldn't understand I told him he wasn't a genius and he basically just described what "startup business" means. It's fine, I'd be interested, but don't act like you're tricking people out of their money for spending the next few years of my life working endless hours to create something for them.

That whole series of how they made Interstellar is fascinating to watch. So many aspects of the filmmaking process that could have been achieved in post was actually created in camera. Nolan is an incredible director IMO.

Part of the reason Nolan gets the budgets he does is because he is always on-budget, if not below. According to this Guardian article from 2014:

"Nolan’s movies have grossed more than $3.5bn worldwide, and his last four films have come in under budget. When Interstellar was finished, Nolan returned what he called a “substantial” amount of money to Paramount."

What's really important is that he gets complete creative control because of this.

Nope. Maybe they paid a grad student $5,800 and made their week, but that's not $58k worth of Animation.

Edit: It's a loop that's like, 0.5 seconds. That's 12 frames of TV, or 6 frames of animation. The model was stupid simple, so one of their technicians probably watched a YouTube tutorial or just asked a friend to show them how. One model, 6 different poses that weren't professionally pieced together, no motion blur or anything else.. yeah. That $58k they wrote off to the producer probably bought someone a whole lot of alcohol.

The decision to use majority practical effects over CGI and the careful planning of executing that and combining the two together.

Here is one such example:

"The anxiety about the economics of a film is crushing," says Nolan, who believes there are ways to alleviate pressure from studios. "I chose to always be on or ahead of schedule and on or ahead of budget."

One example of his punctual production was the opening airplane sequence of The Dark Knight Rises, which Nolan said was the sequence he was most proud of in any of his films. Nolan explained the shots were the result of months of planning that culminated in two days of shooting, even though they had scheduled it for five.

It's very impressive. In software engineering, projects often go overbudget and overtime because it's incredibly hard to predict where the problems will be.

Examples: shipping of a required component is delayed, people getting sick or leaving the company, a small piece of software that doesn't work as you expected, requirements change or misinterpretation, and the list goes on and on.

I've read that its even worse in the CGI industry on this stuff, they basically just make up numbers, and then try to make back money as they lose it on earlier shots by jacking up the rates on the later ones.

Perhaps because Nolan has almost a hundred years of film history behind him to use to estimate the costs of real world filming, he can regularly come under budget?

It also helps that he's earned the right to be given so much money for his films due to his previous movies. I'm sure Nolan would still be making great films with lower budgets if he was forced to, but obviously he can make movies that he otherwise wouldn't be able to without a large budget because the studios expect his films to do well.

I just imagine him walking in a boardroom, tossing down a check for like 10 million dollars, saying "Nolan out", and disappearing, unbeknownst to everyone else, stunned at the figures. That's instant rapport. I wouldn't know if I wanted him to make me another movie or fuck me gently.

It had a production budget of 165m, which is a lot but still way less than a lot of tentpole films which cost 200-300m to make and use mainly CGI.

He values physical effects over CGI because it gets better acting out of the actors (they arent just reacting to nothing on a green screen) and the films will age better as you can go back and watch many films from 10-20 years ago that now look bad in certain scenes because the CGI isn't perfect.

Like Spielberg and James Cameron before him, Nolan is one of only a handful of film-makers who can walk into a studio with an idea and exit with $200m to make it. Nolan’s movies have grossed more than $3.5bn worldwide, and his last four films [The Prestige, The Dark Knight, Inception, The Dark Knight Rises] have come in under budget. When Interstellar was finished, Nolan returned what he called a “substantial” amount of money to Paramount.

“What he realised very early on was that the moment you give the studios an excuse to come in, you’ve lost it,” said Emma Thomas, Nolan’s wife and co-producer, who first met him when he was a student at University College London – studying English but spending all his spare time in the basement of the Bloomsbury theatre, hunched over the college’s Steenbeck editing suite, piecing together his first low-budget shorts. “We watched it happen,” Thomas said. “The moment you go over budget, you’ve lost the creative control than an obsessive director like Chris needs. He’s always been extremely strategic about it.”

It's not specifically talked about in this article, I can't find the original article in which he does talk about it, but large scale CGI is incredibly expensive in comparison to using props and practical effects. You guys know T.A.R.S. and C.A.S.E., the box robots from Interstellar right? Largely practical effects. (Thank you /u/Aarenas52 for the video. As a side note, it really shows the due diligence and preparation that Nolan and other good directors put into their movies during the pre-production and not try to do during filming or post production.) Far far cheaper to use special effects to paint out someone in the background than it is to pay a company to render a full sequence of CGI shots that won't be ready for review for months on end. Anyone see the Overwatch shorts that Blizzard puts out now and again? That quality of CGI costs approximately $1 million per finished minute. So simply by choosing to do a practical effect and supplementing that with careful planning, you can save a lot of money. To quote another article:

"The anxiety about the economics of a film is crushing," says Nolan, who believes there are ways to alleviate pressure from studios. "I chose to always be on or ahead of schedule and on or ahead of budget."

One example of his punctual production was the opening airplane sequence of The Dark Knight Rises, which Nolan said was the sequence he was most proud of in any of his films. Nolan explained the shots were the result of months of planning that culminated in two days of shooting, even though they had scheduled it for five.

With practical effects you can do something like this. You can do something that was supposed to take 5 days and cut it down to 2. And that saves money. To get back to my original point I'll use one last quote from Nolan:

"I do think right now it's difficult for original films to get made," Nolan said, alluding to Hollywood's penchant for producing entities with built-in audiences through sequels, comic book remakes and book adaptations. Where it was once possible to bank on a star consistently pulling in crowds movie after movie, Nolan pointed out that is no longer that case: "It's hard to base a film around casting - there are no commercial guarantees."

There's no guarantee of commercial success or profit when making a movie. Any one of a hundred things could mess it up. But something that Christopher Nolan does that makes the studio trust him with their money, something he does to control them instead of the other way around, is he comes in under budget. With that, he is giving them at least one guarantee: He will save them money even if he doesn't turn them a profit. So that is why he is one of the few directors that is given freedom to do what he wants with a large budget.

His specific views on CGI in movies are also outlined in this quote:

“The thing with computer-generated imagery is that it’s an incredibly powerful tool for making better visual effects. But I believe in an absolute difference between animation and photography. However sophisticated your computer-generated imagery is, if it’s been created from no physical elements and you haven’t shot anything, it’s going to feel like animation. There are usually two different goals in a visual effects movie. One is to fool the audience into seeing something seamless, and that’s how I try to use it. The other is to impress the audience with the amount of money spent on the spectacle of the visual effect, and that, I have no interest in. We try to enhance our stunt work and floor effects with extraordinary CGI tools like wire and rig removals. If you put a lot of time and effort into matching your original film elements, the kind of enhancements you can put into the frames can really trick the eye, offering results far beyond what was possible 20 years ago. The problem for me is if you don’t first shoot something with the camera on which to base the shot, the visual effect is going to stick out if the film you’re making has a realistic style or patina. I prefer films that feel more like real life, so any CGI has to be very carefully handled to fit into that.”

If you watch much of the other related videos (all taken from the special features of the Blu-Ray copy of the movie), you'll get to see exactly what in Interstellar he used CGI for and what he used practical effects for and how he combined them. It's absolutely fascinating. Even the full CGI shots, I think one of the only ones in the movie is of the black hole, Gargantua and that in itself is a very special CGI because they just took the physics equations for a black hole and plugged them into the software to get an accurate simulation of how light responds to a black hole. That supposedly allowed new insights in astrophysics research on the subject.

That supposedly allowed new insights in astrophysics research on the subject.

Astrophysicist Kip Thorne, along with the digital FX chief scientist Oliver James, VFX supervisor Paul Franklin, and CG supervisor Eugénie von Tunzelmann, published a paper on the results from Thorne's equations used by the DFX team's coding to create what they say is a true, natural visualization of a black hole.

Lol, was about to reply to /u/JRuskin saying "Actually, some bloke posted a long post just a couple of days ago about how he does things cheaper using limited CG." Didn't realise you were actually the OP!

So come on, be honest, you seem pretty read up on Nolan, did you really learn this today? ;)

This one I did. Despite Interstellar being one of my favorite movies, I've never watched all the special features regarding its making. After being linked to the one about TARS and CASE, I found that channel pretty much has all of the others so I've been watching them while slacking off at work.

It was kind of funny that I only got to the corn one today because with all of the other ones showing his methodology for props and CGI vs the real thing, by the time I got to this one I started wondering, "Wait a minute... He didn't actually plant all this corn just for a movie did he?" Turns out, yes. Yes he did.

Nolan financed his first film, Following, out of his salary at the time. He rehearsed the scenes massively so they could be shot in one or two takes on 16mm stock. He wrote, directed, shot, edited and produced himself on evenings and weekends. He's earned all the backing he got after that I think.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind comes to mind. I love the look and feel of that movie, and most of it was done practically, or with old school movie editing tricks rather than green screen and computer aided stuff.

To be fair Nolan has an incredibly good track record. Even when he was working on relatively low budget movies (Memento) they were still astoundingly good. He's got to have one of the best batting averages in hollywood as a director.

I'm suspicious there are a lot of other quality directors who could also do similar levels of incredible stuff if their funding and control constraints were likewise removed.

Though Nolan's CV isn't all big budget. He did prove himself with Memento for a $9m budget. He's just good in that he can be very good with a smallish budget, and can also not lose any of that good when studios throw gobs of money at him.

CGI is just one tool in the director's toolbox and if they misuse one tool, they're probably misusing others. Bad movies have bad cgi, but bad cgi doesn't really mean bad movie (I think the most recent example is The Mist's bad monster effects).

There is a genuine Kubrik-NASA connection. To shoot Barry Lyndon with natural light (especially those indoor candlelit scenes), he used lenses that Carl Zeiss made for the Apollo program. They had an aperture of f/0.7! Pay attention to the minuscule depth of field if you ever watch the film.

We had to pay them by living in the darkest of all possible timelines available to us. However, interstellar was a pretty good movie so we got that out of the deal, other timelines had Gladiator 2, which did well commercially but certainly was not as thought provoking.

From what I remember, the person responsible was required by a contract to write a follow up, but didn't want to, so he wrote something that had no chance of ever being made instead of breach his contract.

Kansas isn't completely flat. Western Kansas is completely flat. Eastern Kansas is all rolling hills, AKA the Flint Hills. My wife's family lives in Iowa City so we go there every year, and Eastern Kansas and Eastern Iowa are pretty similar landscapes. Kansas hills are just wheat and prairie, and Iowa's are corn.

As a farmer, what made me cringe was watching the movie act like farmers are out harvesting corn that looked like it had just tasseled. I loved Interstellar, it is one of my favorite movies, but even a cursory glance at how that works should've turned out the knowledge that corn dries down and changes color before harvest. To think of the time spent researching this movie for accuracy, and they couldn't get that right.

Yes, I realize that in a movie where we utilize strands of love in a tesseract constructed by us before we were actually there to transcend space time to relay quantum data via Morse code to the second hand of a very handsome Hamilton Khaki in order to take the entire human race into a wormhole leading across the universe to a planet we hope can sustain us, I am taking issue with farmers harvesting green corn.

It's like Dwight using straw and calling it hay when building Hay Place.

I didn't mind it because I thought it actually added to the whole "declining human society" image. They live in a dying world where only like 5 crops (and dropping) can be grown in the soil, hinting at a food shortage...it felt to me like harvesting one of the planet's last remaining food sources early was just another product of that.

Coming from a farmer... If you see someone obviously trespassing in a vehicle, call law enforcement, please? They can do a lot of damage to drainage on a field that can take a lot of time to fix.
Think of it this way.. if you saw the same truck or even an aTV doing donuts in a front yard in your neighborhood, wouldnt you call or in?

It's amazing to me the disrespect some people have for farmland, as if it's somehow public property. When I was baling my hay field next to a road recently I saw a truck stop maybe 200 feet in front of me after they passed me, get out, toss the trash from their vehicle into our fields on both sides of the road, then carry on as if nothing happened as I tried to catch them with my tractor and baler before they left. I've spent hours cleaning out garbage next to the road in our fields because if I don't then some horse is going to eat it in a bale down the line.

I feel your pain. Dealing with trespassers is the worst part of farming. I hate it. I don't like being a jerk to people but it's really hard not to, because when you catch someone out there you don't know if it was the first time they've ever done it or if they're the person that's done it a thousand times and it's just the first time you've caught them. People are usually dumb enough to leave mail in their trash that they dump on my fields and roads, so when I'm cleaning it up(yes, I'm the faceless person that cleans up trash that gets dumped in my fields) I just take photos and give them to the sheriff and they usually get a ticket for littering.

I don't know how people can do that. I do a lot of work "in the field", by which I don't mean working within farmers fields, but outdoors in places where I often have to cross farmers fields to get to the places where I need to be (usually in a stream or along a lake or sea shore). First thing I do once I figure out the location is drive to the nearest farmhouse to find out who owns the field I may have to cross to get where I need to go. If it's not them, they usually know whose it is ("farmer John just up the road on the left"), and then I go there to ask permission to cross the field.

It isn't that hard to ask people, and they'll tell you whether there are restrictions, like not crossing the tilled part, where there are wagon roads to get around those areas, or where to park your car so you don't block their equipment access. Sometimes they know a better way to get there or will flag places that aren't safe. There are some farmers I've worked with for years.

You aren't being a jerk at all. If people in the city were doing doughnuts on someone's front lawn or dumping trash on it they'd get the same reaction.

Most people lift their trucks for the sole purpose of having lifted trucks. I'd gladly wager that far less than half, if not less than a quarter, of the people who lift their trucks actually do anything with their truck that necessitates the lift.

Notably "costed" is a word but it refers specifically to setting the price of something. As an example: "The new manager costed milk to $2 last week so that's what it cost me when I bought it yesterday". It's more common in British English than American English, where a word like "valued" is more likely to be used.

I've never heard that usage, but the transitive verb "cost" does have another meaning "to calculate the cost of something" for example "they are costing the new widgets and it looks like they'll be much cheaper." The past participle of this sense is "costed".

I don't know. The costs wouldn't be anywhere near the price of starting an actual farm. They dont have the cost of purchasing most farm equipment since they'll be rented, which they'd need to do with the farmer as well. Anything they need to build, such as barns or silos, wouldn't need to be functional/up-to-code, since they'll be just a visual. I'm sure licensing/code/regulations also don't need to followed, at least not nearly as closely, because the whole thing is a prop.

Then there's also the risks involved using someone else's priori. If they get one harvest, but fuck with the soil so that there's a reduced/non-existent yield for another 2-3 years, that's a lot of damages. Or, if the farmer becomes uncooperative mid-filming, they need to deal with that. Costs in delays and distractions could easily trump whatever they'd save renting it.

I'm not saying your wrong, I honestly find myself far more intrigued thinking about this than I should. Ultimately, knowing Nolan's reputation, I'd guess it wasn't a financial decision, but a control one.